After I was surprised by the low numbers of images for a range of ethnicities on iStock, I analyzed annual downloads (Total DLs/age of image) to see if the low result counts were justified.
Average Age of Image in BM vs. Download Sorts
- Given the high number of Agency images in Best Match, I wasn’t surprised by the low average age of BM results.
Conclusions
For yesterday’s post on Summer images, I analyzed data on 1,000 images across ten summer-related searches. I was curious about the relationship between the age of an image and the number of downloads it had.
Total Downloads vs. Age of Image
- The images with the most lifetime downloads are not the oldest ones — rather they are between 3-5 years old.
- The correlation between age & downloads is very close to zero which suggest little to no correlation between the two.
Annual Downloads vs. Age of Image
- The distribution looks very similar here.
Conclusions:
- Just because an image is old, doesn’t mean it will get a lot of downloads.
- New images have come in that are downloaded at a rapid rate.
- Again, as we saw with contributors, age doesn’t appear to be the dominant factor.
I wanted to see which summer activities were downloaded the most on iStock. To do this, I searched for them on iStock using the keywords: “summer <activity>” and recorded the total number of results, and information on the top 100 images when ranked by downloads.
Total Result Counts
- The charts above show: the number of images returned when you search for “summer + keyword”, and the percentage of overall results when you search for “summer”, by itself.
- There are 680,019 images returned when you search for ‘summer’ by itself.
- The set above accounts for 330,660 images or 49% of the total summer images.
Average Downloads Per Image for the Top 100 Search Results
- The chart above shows the average number of downloads per image for the Top 100 images returned when sorting by downloads.
Items of Note:
- I was surprised to see each of the activities accounting for less than 3% of the total summer images in each case.
- Running stands out in the average DLs chart — I would have expected it’s DLs per image to be about half of what they actually were.
I analyzed the top 50 Best Match results when searching for ‘summer’ and broke out the results by collection:
Number of Images
- Exclusive collections account for 43/50 or 86% of the results.
- The total number of results for the search was: 676,858 (~8% of 8 million total)
Average Age of Image
- This the difference in years between the upload date, and the date of the analysis – May 3, 2011
Average Total Downloads
- This is the average lifetime downloads for the images in each collection.
- Given that Agency exceeds Vetta, it suggests that old images were moved into the Agency Collection.
Average Annual Downloads
- This is the total downloads divided by the age of the image broken out by collection.
Things of Note
- Exclusive+ images in this set were best-sellers that were moved to E+. This analysis doesn’t show what’s happening right now, so the impact of this move is something each person will have to analyze for themselves. (You can do this using LookStat.)
- Agency images in this result set are outperforming Vetta, in terms of downloads. Again, I find this hard to believe and it’s likely being skewed by older images. If it is true, then buyers are indeed price-insensitive, and this is good news.
I studied the difference in counts and downloads between people vs. non-people images by running searches on iStock for: business, education, industrial, lifestyle, and medical images. I recorded and analyzed the number of images and also calculated the number of downloads for the Top 200 images.
Image Count
- 7.6% of the images in this sample had nobody in them. (Note: there may be some distortion here due to limited use of the keyword ‘nobody’. But, the ‘No People’ filter includes images of body parts, which I don’t want to count in this analysis).
- 16.4% of the images in the industry category had no people in them (2.3x average).
- I expected business and lifestyle to account for more than 10% of iStock’s eight million or so images, overall.
Average DLs/Image for the Top 200 Images in Each Search
- I obtained the average DLs per image by summing the downloads of the Top 200 images in each search and dividing by 200.
- Overall average DLs/image for the categories shown: 1,153 DLs/image.
- Overall average DLs/image for images with ‘nobody’: 588 DLs/image.
Some Caveats:
- This analysis only applies to the chosen categories. I think the performance of people vs. nobody will be different when looking at subjects like ‘Christmas’.
- I used ‘nobody’ instead of the ‘No People’ filter to exclude images of handshakes, or fingers pointing etc. (Also, the ‘No People’ filter doesn’t work.)
- The reason lifestyle & medical are at exactly 1000 DLs/image is because each of the Top 200 images are in the 1000+ download band.
- Data is cumulative.
Methodology:
I analyzed the portfolio and download data of the Top ~2000 contributors (based on Total Downloads) and plotted:
- Histogram of Number of Photographers versus Portfolio Size
- Average Annual Downloads per Photographer for Each Portfolio Bucket
Chart 1: Histogram of Photographer Count vs. Portfolio Size
- 82% of the photographers in the Top 2,000 have portfolios of 2,500 images, or less.
- The last category is larger than the others because there are so few contributors with portfolios over 10,000 images.
Chart 2: Average Annual Downloads by Portfolio Size
Conclusions:
- I was very surprised to find that less than 20% of photographers in this dataset had portfolios larger than 2,500 images.
- I found the download numbers made more sense since all things being equal, more images should lead to higher earnings.
- I’m curious about average downloads per image for each of the above bands — I’ll post on this subject later this week.
Methodology:
I took the same dataset I used for last week’s post on Rank vs. Tenure, I plotted the following:
- Contributor Rank vs. Portfolio Size
- Average Portfolio Size by Contributor Rank
My goal here was to study the relationship of portfolio size & performance.
Chart 1: Top 2000 Contributors: Rank vs. Portfolio Size
- The average for the entire set was 1,580 files, and the median was 1,067. The spread between these two numbers means that most people have less the mean, but those with very large portfolios are dragging up the average.
- The smallest portfolio in the Top 100 contained 233 images.
- The largest portfolio in the Bottom 100 contained 4,350 images.
Chart 2: Top 500 Contributors – Average Portfolio Size by Rank
- There is a clear break between the top 100 contributors average portfolio sizes and the rest.
- The middle of the range (101-400) are relatively uniform.
Conclusions:
- More images online is correlated with higher rank, but it’s a weaker relationship than I expected — quality plays a major role too.
- Productivity counts — The Top 100 Contributors add 724 files per year, over double that of contributors ranked 400-500, who add 333 files per year.
NB: We can only talk about correlation. You can’t say that if you add 700+ images per year, you’ll be in the Top 100.
Methodology:
I conducted searches for the keyword ‘vacation’ and each continent, on iStock. I summed the downloads for the first 100 Best Match results for each one. If you’re interested, you can check out the searches yourself: Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, South America, and North America.
Results:
Points to Note:
- Australia accounts for 30% of the total DLs for the seven continents.
- I was very surprised by the low DLs for North America. It may be because people don’t search for ‘North America’ but rather search for ‘USA’ or ‘Canada’ (more to come on this one.)
- Editorial is live but sparse — 13 out of 700 items were editorial images (all in North America, South America, & Antarctica.)
To see how images were slotted in iStock’s Best Match search results, I divided 2,100 results into two groups:
- New Images: Images with 0-1,000 DLs
- Proven Images: Images with 1000-10,000+ DLs
New vs. Proven Images by Search Position
The chart below shows the number of new vs. proven images for the first 25 positions.
Points to Note:
- For popular searches (business, medical, lifestyle), the top positions are reserved for images with staying power.
- iStock is dedicating half of the first page to New images (assuming 10 images per row on a typical screen.)
- 80.9% of the first 5 search results were Proven images even though they only made up 40.8% of the total results.
- Digging deeper, there are no images with less than 100 DLs in the first five search positions.
To see how much iStock favored exclusive content in searches, I analyzed 2,100 results which I got by recording the Top 100 Best Match results for three searches — ‘business’, ‘medical’, and ‘lifestyle’ — for 7 days.
Percentage of Exclusive vs. Non-Exclusive Images by Rank in Search Results
The chart plots the % of results that are exclusive vs. non-exclusive for each search position. For example, an image in position 1, is twice as likely to be exclusive vs. non-exclusive (66.6% vs. 33.3%).
Out of 2,100 total search results; 1,687 exclusive vs. 413 non-exclusive. This is a ratio of 4.1:1. This surprised me because I expected a ratio closer to 2:1 in favor of exclusives based on anecdotal information I had heard.
Conclusions:
- It’s great to be exclusive — you’re a 4 to 1 favorite for some of the highest earning searches in best match.
- You may want to consider exclusivity if iStock is at least 25% of your earnings. (You’ll have to make your own decision of course.)
